MARRIAGE: a healer's story

breath taking sight on the sofa

The first time a white woman showed deep interest in me was in college. It frightened me. Pat Pritchard's lips curled somewhere between a smile, temptation, a sneer and a promise. Sometimes it relaxed into a thin line forcing my gaze upward into her deep-set eyes. Her eyes were blue. The blue in her eyes moved the way the waters moved around the Hawaiian Islands in the 1960's. I felt like the depth and gentleness of her eyes would caress me endlessly. It scared me. I knew the lines of her body were drawn by special creatures who studied lines, and motion with such intensity that the intangible qualities of her love-making would capture and hold me against the contradictory nature of my politics, and emotions around white people, race, and my sense of Africa.

She would invite me to clubs. The big names of the times, Miles, Lonnie Liston Smith, and others, would show up at Blue’s Alley and I wanted to go but I wouldn’t go with Pat. But every excuse I had was weak and she met every objection with a solution. She had a car, she would pay for it, she didn’t care about the quality of my clothes, and she loved being with me. She could see my soul. That scared me because she was white and held a type of beauty I understood, and within the spaces between us I was safe, and making her save was natural to me, a given. Everything in me understood her, and resisted the inevitable connection between our souls because she was white. It was unmistakable what lay between us, and I was defenseless against what was a part of me.

But race, the issues around race were at war with my intellect, and my cultural identity. I wanted to be accepted by my own people but Black Americans shunted me aside because I was outside of their idea of what was Black. I held a deep sense of who I was in my early 20’s, and that didn’t include loving a white woman. Race introduces an element between possible relationships that stops or slows a process of growth into a higher state of being. How many marriages, friendships, businesses, churches, and youth organizations were never created because of divisive racial issues?

Pat, at some point, gave in to the pattern set up by her own culture, her family, and the times and married a white man. She invited me to her wedding along with two of my Black friends. We went to the wedding, and read the meaning of the invitation, and what her marriage really meant. We were the only color in a lily white room. During the reception Pat hid none of her elegance, or the beauty of what lived between us, or could have been. The intangible element, the promise, and power of who we could have been, and who we were together was not hidden from view. She walked over greeting us, touched me somewhere lightly with meaning and stared deep in my eyes. I couldn’t tell you a thing she said five seconds later, but all of these decades have passed, and I can tell you what she conveyed. She knew how hard it was to love across the racial lines for me. She knew I had not developed the internal fortitude to weather the inevitable storm. She was not marrying the elements within me she needed at that time. She was marrying for other reasons a white man and that was safe.

I went into mourning. Pat left a birthmark upon my sensibilities, the way I learned to love, unearthed a healer’s song, and taught me to question roles. –Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories